Tomorrow's Truth. Yesterday's Text.

Technology has brought us to the brink of enormous changes in the way we establish and apply the idea of "truth". As we blaze this new path, though, we're still working from intellectual, moral and psychological landmarks that are as old as human nature.

Lifemarking

Facebook and the Buddha: Websites Don't Exist

Facebook’s evolving services are going to trigger some seismic disruptions in our online lives. Those changes touch on some fundamental issues in how we perceive and interpret the world, but they also give us a pretty good idea of how the online world is going to evolve over the next few years.

Life As An Open Book(mark)

The Internet isn't limited to organizing and annotating virtual files. As we start to "bookmark" the people, places and things around us in the real world, we're running into issues of authenticity and control that go back to the beginnings of religion and myth.

Like Pro Quo

Piaget and Our Intellectual Metabolism

We're continually re-building our mental model of the world, and that ongoing process can be influenced by our social interactions. How does help us understand what it means to "Like" something?

A New Discourse

Foucault and the Discourse

In the 1970s and '80s, French historian and philosopher named Michel Foucault examined history as a collective story, and not as an objective list of facts. That perspective has not only changed how we think about culture — it exposes some deep implications of new social technologies.

Identity

The Fall and Rise of Your Online Identity

The "equal and opposite" reaction to the disintegration of the website is going to be the reintegration of persistent, coherent personal identities. That's not an endorsement of any company's efforts to own those identities, but — for better or worse — it's an enormously powerful consequence of these trends.